"Now make the girl older. I would say the severity of the distress will be much less as she gets to be 18 or 25."

Yes, we know you would say it. But do you have anything to back you other than belief?

"To compare that to divorce, the end of a long-term commitment, especially with kids at home isn't fair."

Who said anything about kids or duration?

There are lasting effects of divorce on the divorcee which are independent of the elements of the divorce. But, since you are prepared to insert assumptions in order to dismiss the study of this, there's not a whole lot of point trying to replace your hunches with info.

"I can easily believe that men are more emotionally fragile about many things, but I wouldn't have guessed that this would be true of sexual relationships ending. If you do have references on that I would be interested in seeing them."

Nobody argued that the cessation of sexual activity is harmful or hurtful. It is assumed even in the positive end of a relationship with a physical element. This may be why I can find no trace of anyone attempting to isolate it as an element.

However, there have been studies on the effects of rejection;

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22947827 ---- found that rejection hurts subsequent efforts to form relationships. And the male goes to greater lengths to avoid being rejected by a female and that he is judged more harshly for this by subsequent females than when it is the male initiating the rejection.

Read more http://www.michigandaily.com/content/u-study-shows-impact-being-dumped-future-relationships

Combine http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-squeaky-wheel/201307/ten-surprising-facts-about-rejection
"1. Rejection piggybacks on physical pain pathways in the brain: fMRI studies show that the same areas of the brain become activated when we experience rejection as when we experience physical pain. This is why rejection hurts so much (neurologically speaking)."

With http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/think-well/201102/why-women-are-the-superior-gender
"Many studies have demonstrated that women have a higher pain tolerance than men"

And you should be able to do the math that supports the common finding that men get a more adverse effect from emotional rejection. It doesn't conform to gender stereotyping. But then most science doesn't.

Dante